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http://user-mode-linux.sourceforge.net/
"User-Mode Linux gives you a virtual machine (...) Disk storage for the virtual machine is entirely contained inside a single file on your physical machine. "
Could that be integrated into Knoppix as an easy way to "install" and use custom applications while still booting from CD? All would be written to an USB stick/server/persistent home...
Just a thought.
This seems to me to be a really cool idea. Anyone know more about how to do something like this? I haven't played around with user mode linux yet.
hmm, it's a great lkm but it doesn't do wonders ;)
but seriously, i don't think it it would fix the add-stuff-to-a-cd problem, imho it's more useful for safely allowing users to add devicedrivers and generally give more permissions, as well as easilier giving services a chroot-ed jail (security security security!). Could be wrong, have yet to dive in and exploit all its goodness :D
User Mode Linux is really fantastic, and can do a lot. However, the requirements of UML and the problem it would be used to solve in this case make it a bad fit for what you want to do.
UML provides a complete, subsidiary and standalone Linux environment to run at "user-level." That is, you can run a Linux environment within a Linux environment - I've had Debian Woody running under Red Hat 7 before.
It can also be thought of as a "super-jail" or "super-chroot" environment.
However, UML needs memory+swap to use as the UML RAM space - and if you want KDE, you'll need 64M just for UML - plus the 64M for the host. In truth, 128M for both is better - meaning 256M or better for both.
Plus, it will be as if you have two hosts - which means configuring the host to accept data from the UML host.
All in all, wouldn't it just be simpler to make /usr/local writable and compile applications to /usr/local?